Animol review – gritty young offenders drama challenges conventional machismo

Institutional menace and an idealistic take on redemption sit side-by-side in Top Boy actor Ashley Walters’ empathic and occasionally over-earnest film The lawless brutality of a young offender institution is the setting for this British movie written by Marching Powder ’s Nick Love and directed by Ashley Walters. It’s a place where terrified newbies realise they can survive only by abandoning their innocence and decency, and submitting to the gang authority of a psycho top G, naturally involving a horrible loyalty test. This is a place where drugs arrive by drone, where facially tattooed men meet each other’s gaze with a cool opaque challenge in the canteen, and where the cues and balls on the recreation area’s pool table have only one purpose: to give someone a three-month stay in the hospital wing while underpaid guards in lanyards and ill-fitting v-neck jumpers look the other way. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/CLu4l65 via IFTTT

Old Man review – wilderness horror as cranky codger faces off with mysterious hiker

Lucky McKee’s psychological horror starring Stephen Lang feels inauthentic and flat

Here is an unexceptional psychological horror from director Lucky McKee that feels dated and clunky, with some fairly ropey acting – or maybe that is down to the shaky lines put into the actors’ mouths. It only comes alive after a freaky plot twist at the end, but even that left the hairs on the back of my neck unprickled, the carpet under my feet unpulled.

Stephen Lang plays a cranky codger known only as Old Man who lives in the remote Smoky Mountains wilderness. The set design of his wooden cabin is distractingly inauthentic; it’s like an Ikea store display that has been done up in hicksville chic. Old Man has woken up in a filthy temper; first his dog, Rascal, pees on the floor, and then there is a knock at the door. Old Man shoves his shotgun into the face of the stranger standing outside. “Do as I say, or you’ll end up like her,” he growls, jabbing the gun at a stuffed wildcat on the wall.

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